Political Scene: Back to the Base

On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Dorothy Wickenden talks with Hendrik Hertzberg, John Cassidy, and Ryan Lizza about President Obama’s jobs speech, which seems to have disrupted the prevailing narrative about the White House and Congress. Hertzberg puts it this way:

It was a challenge. He was laying down a challenge. And the very thing that liberals, like me, had worried about, which was ‘Oh, he’s just going to ask for a bunch of Republican ideas,’ he somehow turned that around and put those ideas in the service of a progressive liberal vision.

I think it was a big step forward, anyway, because basically for the last eighteen months Obama has been impaling himself on this sort of deficit-reduction stick. Now he’s back to recognizably Democratic, recognizably Keynesian principles, which clearly are called for.

But will the President’s proposal pass?

Republicans “are also looking at terrible poll numbers,” Lizza says.” So, if you notice the responses last night, it wasn’t only an attack on Obama’s ideas. It was, ‘We will consider these.’ So, there’s some pressure that they need to pass something.”

In more than one way, it seems, President Obama has returned to fundamentals. Lizza says, “There’s a lot more emphasis at the White House and the D.N.C. about connecting with voters, trying to reenergize the new voters from 2008.”